Who do you blame for all the deaths to opioid OD’s?

Who do you blame? Where do you point the finger when nearly 100 Americans a day are dying from opioid overdoses?

Where do you set your sights when 27-year-old victims pockmark the obituary pages of your local newspaper?

When medical examiners are so deluged with victims’ corpses they lack the resources to autopsy them all? When families shred into a cyclone of regret, recrimination and anguish that stretches as far as the mind can roam?

Today, in parts of Ohio, bodies are kept in cold storage trailers in parking lots for lack of space. The number of deaths from the epidemic – 200,000 – is more than three times the number of U.S. casualties in Vietnam. And worsening. Early this summer, the elephant tranquilizer carfentanil – 10,000 times as potent as morphine – claimed its first victim in Connecticut. In New Hampshire, 41 have died of the opioid.

An elephant tranquilizer.

So where do you point the finger?

You could blame the victim. You could sneer at their lack of mettle. You could blame the hospitals, dentists, pain doctors, passing out opioids like party favors.

Or you could take a look at the fire hose spewing these drugs into our national blood stream. If you looked hard and deep enough, it would make you scream.

Last week, a joint investigation by The Washington Post and “60 Minutes” reported that Congress, allied with the country’s major drug distributors, effectively kneecapped the Drug Enforcement Agency from its efforts to curb the stream of opioids belching into our cities and towns. With enough money – more than $106 million, according to the report – drug distributors were able to prevent the DEA from halting suspiciously large narcotic shipments from reaching the street.

(In the interest of full disclosure, I should say my brother is a special agent for the DEA; he was not consulted for this column nor involved in the report.)

How big were these shipments that raised the eyebrows of the DEA? Between 2007 and 2012, an Ohio-based drug distributor, Miami-Luken, shipped 20 million doses of oxycodone and hydrocodone to pharmacies in West Virginia, a state particularly hard hit by the opioid epidemic. A staggering 11 million of those pills ended up in Mingo County, population 25,000. Do the math. That’s 440 pills per every man, woman and child in Mingo County.

The DEA could, and did, try to stop these distributors. Beginning in 2006, Joseph T. Rannazzisi, who ran the DEA’s division responsible for regulating the drug industry, used a 1970 law that allowed the department to freeze drug shipments that posed an “imminent danger” to the community.

With such authority, which drug makers carped was too broad, Rannazzisi began putting the screws to internet pharmacies and pain management clinics.

“Rogue doctors wrote fraudulent prescriptions for enormous numbers of pills,” the Post reported, “and complicit pharmacists filled them without question, often for cash. Internet pharmacies, supplied by drug distribution companies, allowed users to obtain drugs without seeing a doctor.”

So flush did South Florida become with these pain clinics that drug dealers began to refer to Interstate 75 as the “Oxy Express.”

But it was when the DEA, under Rannazzisi tried to tackle the nation’s largest drug distributors – McKesson, Cardinal Health and others – for filling “blatantly suspicious” orders from drugstores, that the industry fought back. It marshaled lobbyists to flood the halls of Congress – many former DEA lawyers who went to the dark side, representing drug companies – to weaken DEA’s power.

Working with Congress, these lobbyists were able to weaken the standard by which the DEA can squelch these oversized dumps of opioids on the market. In 2015, Congress passed legislation that raising the bar for DEA to halt drug shipments.

Under the new law, passed unanimously by the House and Senate and signed by President Obama, the DEA must now show a company’s conduct poses a “substantial likelihood of immediate threat” of death, serious bodily harm or drug abuse” before trying to suspend the shipments.

The law worked.

The number of immediate suspension orders the DEA has ordered for doctors, pharmacies or drug companies plummeted from 65 in 2011 to six this fiscal year, the agency reports. Since 2015, not one order has targeted an opioid distributor.

“All we were looking for is a good-faith effort for these companies to do the right thing, and there was no good-faith effort,” Jim Geldhof, a former DEA program manager, told the Post. “Greed always trumped compliance. It did every time. It was about money, and it’s as simple as that.”

So, sure. Tell us we have an opioid crisis on our hands. Tell us something we don’t already know. Pump $9 million into treatment plans that may or may not work. But start first at strangling the pushers manufacturing drugs that are killing Americans indiscriminately.

Think opioid addicts lack mettle? Have no willpower? Lack grit?

Take a look at the our elected officials stuffing lobbyist’s money into their campaign coffers and then tell us who’s deficient in guts.